KJR Conference Information

3/6/2006

KJR Conference Promotional Message

Why you shouldn't wait to register:
We won't know how much food to order if you don't. Register now!

When:
Where:
Price:
Special Client Rate:

March 29 - March 31, 2006
MGM Grand, Las Vegas, NV
$750 per registrant
$500 per registrant

Five more reasons to attend the KJR Conference:

We'll tell everyone what a nice person you are.
You won't feel so lonely when you say IT doesn't "serve internal customers."
Technology: What we deliver, not the panacea for solving all problems.
A promise: We won't offer a bunch of new words to describe old, tired ideas.
After all these years of exchanging e-mails, we'll get a chance to actually talk!

KJR Conference Program

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

7:30 am	Conference check-in and Continental Breakfast
8:30 am	Keynote: Everything You Know is Wrong - Redefining information technology	Bob Lewis
9:45 am	Session: Who needs SOA when you're SOL? Turning around a low-performance IT department	Kelly Williams, CIO
10:30am	Panel Discussion on From SOL to SOA
11:45 am	Lunch/Speaker: Better IT Budgeting, from the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable	Steve Player, Managing Director, The Player Group
1:30pm	Workshops - Drafting the KJR Manifesto	You (and the other attendees)
3:15 pm	Session: Don't automate a pig ... improve the process: Why process management is important, and how IT can drive it forward.	Patrick Sullivan, Vice President, Manchester Companies
4:00 pm	Panel Discussion on Business Process Improvement
6:00 pm	Reception

Thursday, March 30, 2006

7:30 am	Continental Breakfast
8:30 am	Keynote: Managing Change	Bob Lewis
9:45 am	Session: Complying with SOX without Losing Your Socks Two presentations and a conversation	Jeff Sakamoto, CFO, Deep Seawater International, Inc., Danielle Stariha, Director, Internal Audit, Gander Mountain
11:45 am	Lunch/Speaker: Innovation - who is, who thinks they are, who missed the boat	Kirk Rheinlander, Principal, KPJ²
1:30 pm	Workshops - Drafting the KJR Manifesto	You (and the other attendees)
3:15 pm	Session: Guerrilla Capacity Planning	Dr. Neil Gunther, Founder/Chief Scientist, Performance Dynamics Company
4:00 pm	Panel Discussion on Guerrilla Capacity Planning

Friday, March 31, 2006

7:30 am	Continental Breakfast
8:30 am	Keynote: Ten Ideas You Can Use Tomorrow	Bob Lewis
9:45 am	Workshop Reports	Workshop representatives
11:45 am	Lunch/Speaker: Customer Elimination Management	Herschell Gordon Lewis, President, Lewis Enterprises
1:00 pm	Closing thoughts	Bob Lewis

Sessions, with a twist: We're going to do something a bit different from most conferences you’ve attended. After each speaker finishes, a panel of your peers will analyze the content. Our goal is to make sure that when you leave … yes, it’s the same rule – you get practical suggestions you can put to work as soon as
you’re back at your desk. So each panel will explore the critical questions, like:

Is this real, or just something that looks good in Powerpoint?
How does this apply to different types of IT organization?
What will swim up to bite you when you try to do this if you aren't watching out for it?
What are the benefits you can sell to the company’s executives? What are the benefits you can't mention, but are the real reasons for doing this?

The Workshops: Better than best practices: The more I read about ITIL and CobiT, the more nervous I get that many businesses use them as an excuse for joining the Value Prevention Society. The more I read about SEI CMM the more concerned I become that it's becoming the ISO 9000 of our industry. Maybe it's just me, but every "best practice" I run across looks more like a "decent practice for some IT organizations but not others."

We're going to start fixing that ... you and me; mostly you. We're going to break into a bunch of small working groups Wednesday and Thursday, and spend an hour and a half each day putting together the start of ... I dunno, call it the KJR Manifesto. Each group will tackle a significant organizational issue for IT - the ones they don't teach right or don't teach at all in business school because they're messy, political, and involve those pesky human beings - and put together some useful tactics for handling them that have been tested in the bloody battlefields of corporate America.

We'll review the results on Friday, and I'll make them available for download from my website.

Talk about working without a net ...

Getting to know you: As you can see, we’ll have plenty of great content. You’ll also have time to meet and talk to other attendees, at breakfast, lunch and at an evening reception. Keep the Joint Running is a community. We want to help it develop.

How to register: It couldn't be much easier - just click here. If you’re a current client, just let us know and we’ll take care of registering you at the special client discount.

If you live outside the United States, e-mail or fax me (509-277-9175) your registration information.

Hotel reservations: We're past the deadline for our guaranteed rate, but that's okay - at the moment, room rates at the MGM Grand are still very reasonable. At this point It's easiest to book through www.mgmgrand.com.

If you are flying in, the MGM Grand has a check-in facility at the airport where you can even arrange to have your luggage transferred. They'll also arrange for transportation to the hotel, which is near the airport, if you like.

Tell your friends and colleagues about the KJR Conference

1. The more people who attend the KJR Conference the better it will be.

2. The more people who know about the KJR Conference, the more who will be likely to attend.

3. The more people who subscribe to Keep the Joint Running, the more who will know about the conference.

4. The more people you tell about Keep the Joint Running, the more who will know about it.

Q.E.D.

As you can see, the logic is iron-clad. So go ahead and spread the word. I won' t mind. Honest! And if you're thinking that reading KJR yourself gives you a competitive edge over those other folks, here's the counter-argument: New and different ideas are often viewed as dangerous. Encouraging other people to read it will gain you allies much more than it will create competitors.

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